BizCard

Summary

After almost 30 years of working in the HR field, I decided to set up a website The Corporate Toolbox so I could put my books and training online in return for a passive income.
I am the author of four business books:
* Shift Your But
* Finding the Square Root of a Banana
* Did I Really Employ You?
* My Dear Franchisees
a contributor to six others - The A - Z of Interview Questions; You Don't Take a Giant Leap Without a Gulp; The Power of More Than One; Mum's the Word; Best of the Best - NZ Entrpreneurs and recently released - Golden Nuggets - thoughts and wisdom for kids leaving home and entering the big wide world and literally hot off the press 20/20. A Fresh Look at Business Growth. I've also written many e-books.
Over those 30 years I had noticed the reluctance of businesses to invest in training - if there was a global boom the excuse would be 'we have no time' and during a recession it would be 'we have no money'.
Zig Ziglar once said, 'there's only one thing worse than training your staff and having them leave, and that's NOT training them and having them stay!" and stats reveal that 41% of staff leave an organisation because there is no training or potential for development.
So if you are a small to medium sized business, thinking right now - we need to cut training! Please think again, and before you decide you can't afford to train your people, check us out.
If you are a business author, trainer, professional speaker or even a business coach, we want to talk to you about your products and services. In particular, we want to talk to you about MARKETING your products to a global audience, because marketing is all we do.
And finally, if you are someone who wants to write about your business learnings - then we can mentor you through the process. It isn't difficult to get started I promise. I spent a year writing my first book and managed to lose it off my computer. No back ups!! But I decided that I could re-write the book in a week - and I did.
The very first 'Toolbox' site was launched in November 2008 - shortly before The Lehman Bank collapse! Initially I planned to feature my own p;roducts, but within a very short space of time people started approaching me to ask if they could put THEIR products on my site. Absolutely. The more the merrier as far as I was concerned.
We now have over 250 contributors; we've attained and maintained a Google 4 ranking and have over 8000 pages Google ranked. We have achieved that ranking because we blog daily, we tweet daily and we upload new articles and e-books onto the site 5/6 days per week!
The First Stage of Growth
Last year (2010), because the site was starting to get rather unwieldly, we split the site into three categories - subscribers can now sign up for two of three categories:
Â personal development
Â small business tools and
Â corporate products
As each of these databases grows and we get a better sense of our customers needs, we will be able to 'target' the right products to the right niche market.
The Second Stage of Growth
As more and more business authors, coaches, trainers and professional speakers found us, we started receiving requests from them asking if we could recommend ghost writers, web designers; cartoonists; copywriters; SEO experts and the like. And constant requests from speakers asking if we could market their webinars and/or live events.
Similarly, we get regular requests from businesses who ask if we can recommend great speakers, trainers, coaches and mentors, It seemed that the logical next step was to create a place where people could find each other.
Several of these enquiries turned into 'preferred suppliers' which, at the time was the best service we could offer them.
As a result of all the interest, we are launching our first Business Services Directory.
I started this directory because I joined a supposed global directory (Stanford Who's Who - don't touch them with a 10 foot barge pole!) which cost me $US1700 for one year! My listing was miniscule and bore no relation to my business. I wasn't involved at any stage in what the final 'look' of my listing would be, it had none of my SEO search terms and I spent hours on the phone to America trying to get a decent listing for my investment. They couldn't even get my name right!
It was utterly worthless. In the end I had to walk away. I LOST my US$1700 investment.
After that hideous experience and their absolutely appalling customer service, I decided that there had to be room in the business world for a directory which gave good value; excellent customer service and a 100% involvement by someone who gave a damn when a listing was being created.
That remains my promise. We will always be 100% committed to selling contributor products on The Corporate Toolbox website, and will continue to vigorously market on their behalf, but feel we can add even greater value to this whole business niche by marketing a much broader array of services which will generate even more traffic to the site which will increase sales. A win/win for everyone.
WE CONSTANTLY LOOK FOR
* Business authors
* Authors and professional speakers who have books/cds and would like another distribution channel.
* Trainers who have workshops that they can put online
* Anyone who has great up-to-the-minute written business material - articles, white papers, e.books, surveys, questionnaires etc.
But now we can add to that list. Because we are building a directory we are looking for:
* Anyone who offers a service to business - accountants, recruitment agencies, HR companies
* People who offer services to speakers, trainers and authors - ghost writers, SEO experts, editors, publishers
* People who offer services to the conference sector - venues, meeting planners, speaker bureaux
If you'd like more information - please contact me ann@thecorporatetoolbox.com.
Ann Andrews CSP
For more information on The Corporate Tool-Box go to www.thecorporatetoolbox.com or e.mail me at info@thecorporatetoolbox.com.
Check out our latest book 'The Business Survival Kit. 12 x monthly tools to help you kick butt in 2013'. Over 100 thought leaders offer their products for free in this series.
Ann Andrews CSP, Dip Bus (Pmer)
Published Author, Professional Speaker, Team Specialist, Entrepreneur
MD The Corporate Toolbox Ltd